Previous efforts to fabricate optical devices capable of reducing an optical beam spot to dimensions below the classical diffraction limit (on the order of half the wavelength of the illuminating beam, e.g., 200-400 nm) to the sub-100 nm scale have used or considered photo-assisted scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), tapered plasmonic wires, enhanced transmission apertures and tapered optical fiber probes. These approaches change the effective wavenumber of the light wave propagation mode to reduce the dimensional characteristics of the guided electromagnetic wave— e.g., a surface plasmon. In so doing, the photon electric field can be confined in a smaller spatial region well below the diffraction limit. Advantages of such small and concentrated optical spots include the abilities to read and write higher density of data to optical and magnetic storage devices, to conduct single molecule Raman spectroscopy, to achieve sub-diffraction-limited microscopy, to realize optical logic arrays using novel optical switches, and to build highly sensitive detector arrays. However, devices so far developed using such approaches have been highly inefficient. Due to the intrinsic scattering, absorption, and/or resistive heating, transporting photons from the micro-scale and confining them into a 100-nm-diameter spot can result in 20-60 dB loss, depending on technique used. Losses of this magnitude, which increases even more dramatically as the spot size becomes smaller than 100 nm, makes it very challenging to implement the applications mentioned above.